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Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Childhood Medicines Worse Than The Symptoms

As
of April 11, 2017, I am pleased to report that I have managed to make it
through the first three and a half months of 2017 without having any sort of
illness whatsoever! Of course, I now
realize that I have jinxed myself and I'm probably going to now catch the flu,
a bad cold, and possibly even a case of the mumps. But, hey, I'm okay with tempting fate once in a while.

Of
course, taking a sick day as an adult can be a pain in the butt. I can't really afford to miss any work due
to illness, so more often than not I suck it up to get through the day. Or, in the case of last summer, the whole
season. That was the summer that I
sounded like a chain smoker with permanent laryngitis. Good times.

Now,
as a kid, I have to admit - I LOVED taking sick days. In fact - and you know what, it's been seventeen years since I
was in school, so I can openly admit to this.
I have purposely taken sick days when I wasn't even sick to avoid going
to school. Not because I didn't like
learning. It was more like I didn't
like my classmates. Believe me, it
wasn't that hard to convince my mom that I was sick when I really wasn't. Truth be told, I think she caught on but let
me do it anyway, knowing that I could easily catch up in my studies.

I
didn't like it as much when I really was sick though. I mean, yes, it was fun to watch television on the couch and to
draw pictures with my Crayola crayons.
But not so much fun when you're coughing up a lung or throwing up every
hour on the hour.

I
think the hardest part about being sick as a child was not so much the symptoms
of being sick, but the medicines that I had to take in order to make the
symptoms go away. Sometimes, the remedy
is worse than the sickness. Mary
Poppins could pour an entire sack of sugar on the medicine and it still
wouldn't go down in the most delightful way.

So,
I suppose that's what this blog topic is about today. Childhood medicines that were horrible.

Now,
just to keep this post on the lighthearted side, I'm going to only use examples
of actual medicine that can be taken via the mouth. And I won't be talking about life-saving medicines that people
would take to cure serious illnesses either.
As nasty as some of those treatments can be, they are completely
necessary.

But let's face it. Some of the medicine
that I remember taking as a kid was awful.
Simply awful.

For
one, when I was a kid, I couldn't swallow pills. As an adult, I find it much easier and can down a couple of Advil
when a migraine strikes without any difficulty. But whenever I had to take a Gravol for car sickness, or if I was
prescribed medicine in pill form, I had a very difficult time swallowing
it. It got so bad that my mom had to
put the pill inside a container of Laura Secord butterscotch pudding and mix it
in to make sure that I swallowed it.

As
tough as it was to take medicine in pill form, I found it even more harder to
take medicine in liquid form. And
unlike pills, you can't mix liquid medicine with butterscotch pudding. Trust me.
I tried it once. Should have
renamed it BITTERscotch.

I
think one of my earliest memories of dealing with medicine that I didn't like
was when I was in the first grade. I
recall being really sick with some sort of sinus infection that just wouldn't
go away, and my doctor at the time prescribed a medicine called Keflex to
alleviate the symptoms and to make the infection go away.

At
least, that was the intent of it.

It
was bad enough that the Keflex was in liquid form. It was worse when I realized that the medicine was strawberry
flavoured. It's bad enough that I'm
allergic to strawberries (though I didn't know it at the time). But the strawberry flavour of the medicine
was so fake and so potent that it caused me to have a side effect after taking
the medicine.

It caused me to throw up on cue.

No
matter what my mom tried, I would not be able to take that strawberry flavoured
goop. No way, no how. I actually remember hiding in the closet
whenever it was time to take the stuff because it was one of those rare
medicines that made me sicker than I was.
Finally after about three days of this, I was back at the doctor. He prescribed me some penicillin that had
tasted like banana which went down so much easier. Fake strawberry flavour was nasty. Fake banana wasn't much better, but at least it was better
tasting.

And
I think most of us know the joys of taking cough syrup. It's entirely nasty. From Buckley's to Robitussin to Dimetapp and
everything in between, I can't recall sipping a tablespoon of cough syrup and
thinking that it was the best thing I had ever tasted.

For
me, the worst was when I had a really bad cough and I had to take Triaminic
cough syrup. Can I just state that it
was the most disgusting stuff that I have ever tasted? Well, at least the red stuff was
anyway. That was all that my mom bought
and it was as if someone had taken Cherry Kool-Aid and dumped alcohol, Vicks
Vaporub, and vinegar inside of it.
That's probably the best way that I could describe it. The reason my mom would buy the red stuff
was because it was formulated for coughs.
And since I was a childhood asthmatic, my cough tended to stick around a
lot longer than any other symptom.

It was only when I had a fever and a runny nose that Mom bought the orange
stuff...which I liked the taste of much better. I was like...why didn't you just get this stuff before?

So, I suppose the moral of the story when it
comes to childhood medicines is this.
Butterscotch pudding was the best for swallowing pills. Strawberry flavouring should never be used
for flavouring medicine. And stay away
from red cough syrup.